Pertaining to hair / WED 1-21-26 / Classic P.O.W. movie starring Steve McQueen, with "The" / Polarizing punctuation choice / Transaction on an online marketplace / German steel city / Inflation measures, for short / Like government bonds and Uber drivers / Spar on a sailing boat

Constructor: Ginny Too and Avery Gee Katz

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Across the Pacific — clues form a poem about someone named Lee going about his day—parallel poems, actually: one on the left (west) side of the puzzle, and one on the right (east). On the left, the clues indicate that Lee lives in China (or maybe Taiwan); on the right, that he lives in North America. Dividing the two poems, appropriately: the PACIFIC OCEAN.

Theme answers:

• Lee has a hot bowl of ___ to start his day (14A: CONGEE / 15A: OATMEAL)
• Says ___ to his neighbors, then heads on his way (37A: NIHAO / 39A: HELLO)
• With gossip and beer over Friday's ___ game (65A: MAH-JONG / 66A: BRIDGE)
• Life across the ___ is much the same (17D: PACIFIC OCEAN)

Word of the Day: PILAR (32D: Pertaining to hair) —

: of or relating to the hair or a hair : hairy (merriam-webster.com) 

• • •

Great idea, disappointing execution. I just can't deal with the corny poem. The very concept of the poem doesn't work that well from a solving standpoint, because solvers don't always (or even usually) solve in a regular top-to-bottom fashion; so what ends up happening is that you run into "verses" all out of order. This wouldn't be so bad—certainly themes often unfold in top-to-bottom order—but in this one, the poem starts in the Acrosses but finishes in the Downs, which is super-awkward, as that "final" Down clue starts way up where the beginning of the poem is. So I'm looking at the revealer, the final line, the "punchline" of the poem before the poem even has a chance to unfold. It's all very awkward, from a poetic standpoint. But more than the awkward layout, it's the poem itself that is the problem (for me). It doesn't work as poetry. It rhymes, but it doesn't scan At All. It has none of the regular rhythm that rhyming poetry usually has. Plus, the poem depicts the most arbitrary "day" anyone has ever had. OK,  you get up and eat breakfast and head out for your day, saying hi to your neighbors along the way, that makes a kind of sense. But then ... the only thing you do for the rest of your day is play MAH-JONG / BRIDGE? Also, BRIDGE??? That's your definitive "(North) American" game??? Actually, I don't think anything right-side Lee does is particularly "American." I know that the demands of grid symmetry can be onerous, but you gotta find a better, more plausible way to fill out this guy's day. The fact that the poem seems like a child wrote it, that it doesn't even have "roses are red"-level rhythm to it, and that it's awkwardly laid out, all these things diminished my experience of the theme, despite the fact that conceptually, structurally, visually, I really admired it. Using the PACIFIC OCEAN as a divider like that—ingenious. 

The fill in this one gets pretty rough in places. The grid is carved sections that are loaded with 3-4-5s, and those sections (all of them constrained by theme elements) occasionally get ugly or rough. The suffix -ICAL is truly awful fill, but I have some sympathy there, as MAH-JONG's immovable presence was always gonna make that SW corner a tight squeeze. The "J," as well as the "H" placement, really restricts what you can do down there. But the ugliness in the SE I understand less. Both longer answers there feel at least semi-awkward. EBAY SALE ... those do happen (50A: Transaction on an online marketplace), but I don't love that as a standalone answer, any more than I'd love AMAZON SALE or BOOKSTORE SALE or whatever. And EPA LABS? (45D: Govt. sites for testing pollutants). I am sure those exist (or existed—does the EPA even function any more? I assume by this point it's just been converted into an arm of the petrochemical industry). But I don't think anyone would ever use EPA LABS in their puzzle unless software suggested it. PSIS as clued is absurd (just admit you've got a plural Greek letter on your hands) (60A: Inflation measures, for short). ESSEN is the capital of Crosswordeseville (everyone thinks it's OSLO, but it's ESSEN) (54D: German steel city). You've also got the partial ABU down there. It's not great. 

The hardest part for me was the NIHAO section in the west, partly because HELLO also ends in "O" (so that's what I filled in when I got the "O"), and partly because I only barely know the word PILAR and certainly couldn't recall it without help from crosses. Also, in that same section, the clues on PLOTS and EARS were both hard. I had EPEES instead of PLOTS at first (40A: They might be foiled). Aren't EPEES also called "foils?" They're both fencing weapons, anyway. As for the clue on EARS (43A: All ___), pfft. No idea. Could've been DONE, GONE, OVER, RISE, who knows what else? I also continue to believe that the Italian excuse is spelled SCUSI, not SCUSE, so that caused a bit of a hang-up, as did RATABLE, which ... wow, what an ugly "word" (8D: Like government bonds and Uber drivers). Everything is RATABLE if you try hard enough. Things are rated all the time, but RATABLE, however real a word, is borderline nonsense.

Bullets:

• 19A: Like those local to Universal Studios Japan (OSAKAN) — weird to divide your grid into Asia on one side and North America on the other, and then have the OSAKAN somehow living on the International Date Line.
• 42A: Like the villain at the end of a "Scooby-Doo" episode (OUTED) — somehow this doesn't quite feel like the right word for what happens in "Scooby-Doo." UNMASKED is the mot juste here, I think. OUTED is defensible, but off. 

• 4D: Bird with a plume that, ounce for ounce, was once worth more than gold (EGRET) — ah, the despoiling of the Everglades in the service of ladies' fashion. Love to start my morning with the wholesale slaughter of animals. The clue makes the EGRET plume sound kind of mysterious and romantic. The reality is somewhat uglier. "By 1900, more than five million birds were being killed every year, including 95 percent of Florida's shore birds" (wikipedia). 
• 51D: Spar on a sailing boat (SPRIT) — this is one of those words that continually gets me into trouble in Quordle (the 4x Wordle game I play every morning after Wordle), because your letter choices will really look like the answer's gonna be STRIP, but ... there's always the possibility that SPRIT lurks in the shadows, waiting to ruin your guess.
• 26A: Polarizing punctuation choice (SERIAL COMMA) — better (or also) known as the Oxford comma, it's the comma before the conjunction in a list of things. The NYTXW does not use it. I know because I have typed out more revealer clue lists than I care to remember (you know, this sort of thing: "... as seen in the answers to 17-, 26-, 46- and 64-Across"—no comma after the "46-"). I should add that I love this answer, best thing in the grid besides The GREAT ESCAPE, which is maybe the best action film of all time (I am normally immune to the alleged pleasures of quintessentially "guy" movies, but I watched this last year and it's honestly a perfect action film, filled with incredibly likeable actors—Steve McQueen and James Garner?! Bullitt and Rockford!? I'm in) (46A: Classic P.O.W. movie starring Steve McQueen, with "The")

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Novel feature of the 1974 Olds Toronado / TUE 1-20-26 / Skill shared by bats and dolphins / Hellenistic storytelling / Sports grp. for Coco Gauff / Fight night souvenir, perhaps / Historic destination for Pueblo pilgrimages / Modern pickup sport for delivery drivers / East coast convenience chain with a reduplicative name / Tour overseer, for short / Mayberry boy of '60s TV

Constructor: Jonathan Raksin

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (just a bit harder than the typical Tuesday)

[23D: "Star Wars" princess (LEIA)]

THEME: ECHOLOCATION (53A: Skill shared by bats and dolphins ... or, when read as two words, what 19-, 26-, 34- and 44-Across each is) — locations of four different "Echo"s:

Theme answers:

• NATO ALPHABET (19A: It begins with Alfa and ends with Zulu) (Echo = letter "E")
• GREEK MYTHOLOGY (26A: Hellenistic storytelling) (Echo = Nymph in love with Narcissus)
• AMAZON WAREHOUSE (34A: Modern pickup sport for delivery drivers) (Echo = some stupid A.I. thing you allow to surveil you in your own home for some reason)
• THE GRAND CANYON 44A: Historic destination for Pueblo pilgrimages) (Echo = sound repetition)

Word of the Day: Echo (of GREEK MYTHOLOGY) (26A) —

[Echo and Narcissus by John William Waterhouse (1903)]

In Greek mythology, Echo (/ˈɛkoʊ/; Greek: Ἠχώ, Ēkhō, "echo", from ἦχος (ēchos), "sound"^[4]) was an Oread who resided on Mount Cithaeron. Zeus loved consorting with beautiful nymphs and often visited them on Earth. Eventually, Zeus's wife, Hera, became suspicious, and came from Mount Olympus in an attempt to catch Zeus with the nymphs. Echo, by trying to protect Zeus (as he had ordered her to do), endured Hera's wrath, and Hera made her only able to speak the last words spoken to her. When Echo met Narcissus and fell in love with him, she was unable to tell him how she felt and was forced to watch him as he fell in love with himself. [...] [According to Ovid's Metamorphoses], when Narcissus died, wasting away before his own reflection, consumed by a love that could not be, Echo mourned over his body. When Narcissus, looking one last time into the pool uttered, "Oh marvellous boy, I loved you in vain, farewell", Echo too chorused, "Farewell." // Eventually, Echo, too, began to waste away. Her beauty faded, her skin shrivelled, and her bones turned to stone. Today, all that remains of Echo is the sound of her voice.(wikipedia)

• • •

There's something regrettable about the fact that this theme has to go through Amazon. I guess that since the Amazon Echo exists, you gotta use it, but ... do you? I just find it so depressing to see the puzzle shilling for Amazon, a behemoth that does not need the free advertising. And I can't think of many places on earth more depressing than an AMAZON WAREHOUSE, nor any grid-spanning answer I'd less like to see splashed across the center of my puzzle. After I finished the puzzle and grasped the "Echo" theme, it actually took me a few beats to understand how AMAZON WAREHOUSE worked. I thought, "yeah, they are pretty vast, your voice probably would echo in there... but... that's the same kind of echo that you'd experience at THE GRAND CANYON. You can't repeat echoes like that ... [two seconds later] ... oh. Right. It's a 'smart' device. <sarcasm> Great </sarcasm>." I think this would make a very nice three-themer puzzle. It's ridiculous that you've got the the Echo in a warehouse anyway. Most people only ever see the Echo in their homes (if they see them at all). AMAZON WAREHOUSE does have the "virtue" of making clear the Echo in question (it's got AMAZON in it, after all). Honestly, from a purely structural standpoint, the answer works fine. It's just that my personal distaste for all things Bezos and the anti-free trade, anti-union behemoth that is Amazon prevents me from really liking this puzzle as much as I'd like to. It's amazing (and heartening) to me that BEZOS, despite having a five-letter name with a very attractive "Z" in it, has appeared in the grid only once, and not for 15 years now! Let's keep that trend going!

The theme concept is a winner. Nice wordplay on the revealer. Really delivers on the aha. The fill on this one I liked less. Easier to fill a puzzle cleanly with fewer themers—just sayin'! The cramming together of three themers in just five rows makes the crossing fill veer sharply toward SLOP (40D: Unappetizing food). The puzzle is definitely at its crosswordesiest through there, from AGRA through LEIA ORG WTA WAWA HAR LAH to the ETNA SLOP and the always regrettable UEYS. Just not a pleasant place to spend time. But alarm bells were going off much earlier, actually. I was just POSIES PGA ORD-deep in the puzzle when I paused and thought "ORD? Already? Uh oh." It's an airport code, it's a Fort in California, it's short for "ordinance" (or "ordinal"), it's [checks database] a river in Australia!? OK, take it easy, 1989 Thursday puzzle. Anyway, ORD is some top-shelf crosswordese. OOXTEPLERNON (the god of bad short fill) always flies through O'Hare, both because it is a hellish place where people often get stuck (apt!), and because it has the crosswordesiest airport code of them all. What about SFO and LAX, you say? At least those have the cities they serve embedded in the codes themselves. ORD is some nonsense you just have to memorize (O'Hare's original name was Orchard Field Airport). I don't mean to pick on ORD too much, but every time I see it, I wonder what's making the constructor so desperate. It felt like an omen, seeing it right away. 

But the most regrettable fill today wasn't the short common stuff. No. Instead, it came when someone LIT A FIRE IN A RUT. That takes the EAT A SANDWICH answer type to a whole new level—the EAT A SANDWICH IN A DINER level. This is the first time this level has ever been achieved, to my knowledge. It's one thing to roll out a weak "[verb] A [noun]" phrase, but quite another to follow that phrase with a "[preposition] A [noun]" phrase. Truly horrifying remarkable. What happens when you light a fire in a rut under a WHALE POD? You don't want to know. Also, WHALE POD felt redundant. A group of orcas is just a pod. Or it's an orca pod. If you know they are orcas, you are going to call them an ORCA POD. I think the clue is bugging me here more than the answer, actually. Check out this ORCA POD in Wellington Harbour:

Speaking of Wellington, or New Zealand, anyway: Split ENZ! (27D: Split ___ (New Wave band whose name sounds like a hair problem)). Seeing ENZ was a moment of deep ambivalence for me, as I love the band but hate to see just ENZ all on its own. Full-name bands > partial-name bands. And the clue was disappointing as well, since there was every opportunity to mention the band's country of origin (the "NZ" is embedded right in the name!), but they chose instead to go for "hair problem" as their hint. Boo. But yay for Split ENZ. They mean a lot to me. So funny to have loved Split ENZ as a kid, and then Crowded House after them, and then to discover (and love) the Dunedin (NZ) bands the Bats and the Chills as a young man, and then eventually, ten or so years later, marry a woman from Dunedin. It's a pretty small city, on the other side of the world! What are the odds!?

Bullets:

• 43A: Fight night souvenir, perhaps (WELT) — "Fight night" makes me think of the audience's experience, not the fighter's. I wanted something like "ticket stub." Also, this answer was hard because I spelled the (hateful) crossing, UEYS, like so: UIES. Sadly (very sadly), both are acceptable, per NYTXW tradition. 
• 37D: Sports grp. for Coco Gauff (WTA) — once again, I cannot come up with the tennis org. abbr. ATA? UTA? All sports org. abbrevs. are slowly turning into one ball of gelatinous goo in my head. 
• 11D: Novel feature of the 1974 Olds Toronado (AIR BAG) — one of the clues that made this puzzle harder than the usual Tuesday. I was looking for something "novel" in the sense of strange or eye-catching. Like tailfins or a dome or laser beams or something, I dunno. Needed many crosses to see the plain-old AIR BAG.

[1974 Olds Toronado]

• 20D: Prefix for element #8 (OXY) — LOL that I know the Periodic Table that well. I still don't know what element this is. Is it "Contin"? Hang on ... wait, what? Oxygen? So the "prefix for" is actually a "prefix already in"!?!?! If you say "Prefix for" something, I assume (logically) that it is a prefix that you can attach to whatever thing you're talking about, not one that's already part of the word. Unless there is an "oxyoxygen" I know nothing about, I hate this clue.
• 12D: Visibly disdainful (SNEERY) — I am visibly disdainful of SNEERY. I know you can't see me, but trust me: visibly.

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. shout-out to my mom, out on the streets protesting fascism (that's her with the "Democracy Depends on Rule of Law" sign) (shout-out to the other lady too!)

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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